Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 about User Experience on Tuesday 13th March

The consumerization of the enterprise is an emerging concept transforming the look and feel and intent of the software we use to run our businesses. It’s lowering the barriers of adoption, flipping the top-down model on its head and integrating consumer-friendly features we’ve grown to know and love in our personal lives. Gone are over-priced and complicated solutions catering to big companies with deep pockets. In are solutions that are based on an uncluttered user experience common in consumer websites, are customized for individuals, adopted bottom-up, can cater to small initial teams, yet scales as a business' needs grows. Salesforce, Dropbox and Yammer are examples of consumerized enterprise products that address small and medium business needs in customer relationship management, storage and internal communications. In this session you’ll learn how we got here, principles guiding new product design and development, and how these products impact your bottom line and culture.

Enterprise and consumer experiences are blurring more everyday as applications move to the cloud and companies build a vertical stack of offerings. Today's Facebook and Twitter generation expect their applications to be as easy and enjoyable to use as consumer applications. As the cloud evolves, our design process must evolve with it. What does the enterprise user experience design process look like today and where is it going? Guided by examples from Salesforce and Do, learn about the unique challenges and solutions of designing usable applications for enterprise users.

With the Agile Manifesto reaching its 10th birthday last year this one-time fringe software development methodology has become very much mainstream. Requiring feedback early and often, Agile’s main goal is to get software into the users hands fast. Relying on these feedback loops to guide development and shape the product to come. While Agile is user centric does it actually support the fundamentals of Experience Design? Is there enough time to research and properly explore design concepts? Is the user being short-changed for business benefit? A hands-on interactive game highlights the challenges of Agile development and explores how Experience Design can be integrated for the benefit of all.

Usability testing is an interaction designer’s bread and butter, but applying it to the study of mobile applications and websites brings considerable challenges. Which device should we use for testing? Can we use an emulator? How do we prototype for mobile? Can we just recycle the tasks we use for desktop software tests? Do we test in the lab or in the wild? How do we record screen, fingers and facial expressions?

We don’t intend to answer all those questions in just one session: that would be madness! We’ll focus instead on the last one.

Follow us in our quest to set up a mobile usability testing environment on a tight budget. We’ll show you how others do it. We’ll roam around electronics and professional video stores searching for brackets and webcams. We’ll put our DIY skills to the test and waste a lot of silicon trying to build our mobile recording device. We’ll scour the Internet for free software, and we’ll finish off building the lab and running a usability test in front of your eyes.

If we can do it, so can you! You’ll come out of this session knowing exactly what you need to do to run and record usability tests with mobile devices.

Consumers today expect more and more from your brand. While some would argue, consumer's now "own" your brand, we counter with the notion that companies who’ve lost their brands to their consumers did so because they failed to remain relevant.

Traditionally, brand communications focused on "how" companies were going to tell the story of their brand. In today's market, the "how" is being replace by "what". The focus is on what is being said and through what medium. For brands to deliver on their unique value, and their promise, they need to create experiences, build programs, and offer entire solutions that demonstrate "what" brands are doing, rather than "how" they are saying it.

Digital media allows for new ways not only for brands to connect with consumers, but also to learn from them, innovate, and strengthen their promise. Digital media and interactive products offer brands a new set of tools, and experiences to compel and engage audiences. As brand and product experience collapse into one another, branding in the interactive space calls for new approaches to both. This panel discusses how best practices from advertising, user experience and interaction design can be applied meaningfully to branding in the interactive space.